Simplified tariffs UK v France

Cardew

Ofgem in their wisdom have decided that the concept of Tier pricing is far too complex for the British public to understand.

In France there are essentially just 3 electricity options - so simpler to understand?? M

Mmm! this is the Tempo option:

Option Tempo
This system has six rates of electricity pricing in total. Each day of the year is colour coded, depending on the forecast of usage by EDF for that day.

There are three colours, blue (jours bleus), white
(jours blancs) and red (jours rouges) which represent low rate, medium rate and high rate.

On top of this each day has a cheaper and higher rate
based on the Heures Creuses option above, with 10pm until 6am being a cheaper rate (heures creuses) than the rest of the day (heures pleines). The rules for tempo are

* The tempo year starts on 1st September.
* The tempo day starts at 6am.
* There are 300 blue days, 43 white days and 22 red days per tempo year.
* The number of days of each colour is fixed each tempo year.
* Sunday is always a blue day.
* Red days can not fall on a holiday, weekend or more than 5 weekdays in a row.

The good news is that this means, despite the increased
standing charge, electricity on blue days is by far the cheapest that you can get it, and during the cheap rate on a blue day the rate is extremely low.

On white days the rate is higher than either option HC or
Base, but not by much. The bad news is that on red days the cost is over 10 times that of cheap rate blue, i.e. it is prohibitively expensive to encourage lower usage.

Of course these days are usually the coldest of the
winter.
The main draw back is that you don’t know what colour the next day is until 8pm the night before.

DragonQ

That's just madness.

rogerblack

I dunno.
I'd quite like that tarriff.
I'd be installing a rather large heatbank that charged up on sunday night.
(Couple of tons of brick, oven fan, several storage heater elements, insulation, job done.)

Richie-from-the-Boro

In France its 3 base rates + 3 'off-peak' rates for ripple heated water units, so 6 in total

Option Heures Creuses (Option HC)

Option HC suits the majority of houses occupied full-time where heating is non-electric.

This is a two-part time-of-use tariff with normal (heures pleines) and off-peak (heures creuses) rates. The standing charge is slightly higher than that of Option Base, but this is offset against a lower off-peak rate for part of the day. The off-peak period is from 10 pm until 6 am each night and, in some regions, also at midday. Option HC is usually used in conjunction with a water heater operated by ripple control so that the heating element is switched on only during off-peak periods.

Andy_WSM

I think I could cope with a system like that tbh. In fact, if it encourages the right behaviours I'd go as far as to say I'd support it.

I really don't like the fact that everything is dumbed down in the UK nowadays "for our good".

Be_Happy

* The tempo year starts on 1st September.
* The tempo day starts at 6am.
* There are 300 blue days, 43 white days and 22 red days per tempo year.
* The number of days of each colour is fixed each tempo year.
* Sunday is always a blue day.
* Red days can not fall on a holiday, weekend or more than 5 weekdays in a row.


This section is hilarious. Put in some amounts for calculation and it's like something from our Arithmetic tests 50 years ago.

scaredofdebt

The problem with Offgem's idea is that the utility providers will replace it with something just as complex.

For example, you'll have a daily standing charge and then a single unit rate.

This will unfairly penalise low users, ie the elderly.

insanegloss

scaredofdebt wrote: »

The problem with Offgem's idea is that the utility providers will replace it with something just as complex.

For example, you'll have a daily standing charge and then a single unit rate.

This will unfairly penalise low users, ie the elderly.

Depends on your definition of 'fair'. In two tier pricing, the higher consumers subsidised the low consumers. Is this 'fair'? Now that people are being moved to a standing charge and a single unit rate, there is no cross subsidy, one could easily argue that this is a 'fairer' system.

HappyMJ

Isn't France where you pay standing charges depending on what your maximum load would be...in kVA...i.e from 3kVA to 18kVA. I'd be OK on about 9kVA as long as I didn't have an electric shower whilst I was cooking with the electric oven and the bathroom electic fan heater on. Anyone with electric heating might struggle on 18kVA.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Its all part of the TOU [time of use] peak pricing and critical peak reduction debate. Essentially you get money knocked off the leccy price for reducing your demand use below their baseline use during their critical peak events. As far as I can see its peak demand reduction, and as an E7 user that's no use whatsoever to me, my peak demand use is never liable to be above their baseline use. If electric water and space daytime heating was directly controlled for the current E7 users on a TOU day tariff, and the cost / benefit ratio was to my advantage I'd take another look at it, but to me all the benefits seem slewed towards the provider not the end user. If however it was truly tailor [able] and for example weekend day rate was 50% of my night rate it would be worth jumping in and out of the TOU. In the final analysis if the TOU discounted day rate is higher than my current E7 night rate why would I even bother !

Worth a look though, so thumbs up to Cardew for bringing it to the groups attention.

Plushchris

LOL @ "More than five weekdays in a row"

Erm, How many weeks of the year have more than five weekdays in a row? Is it different in the french calendar? lol